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November’s tinkering was reduced by life and holiday stuff — new job, Sam’s birthday, the start of the holidays, a death in the family, and so on. It’s been a rough month. I did manage to escape here and there to accomplish a few things, however, and that was good for my mental health.

Code

The DBN UAA WordPress plugin made a lot of headway during the early part of the month, which was nice. I fully expect that to be launched live in December.

Housekeeping-wise, I also set up a script that updates my dynamic DNS on Google Domains, and scheduled it to run at 15-minute increments via crontab.1

I also re-wrote the hipsterbot, using PHP which I execute from the command line. The previous instance of it was a horrible kludge that used bash scripting, a textfile dump of JSON data, and a Ruby script to make sense of it all. As I said: kludge. This is one tool I probably won’t be releasing — there’s no sense in overwhelming a small service with a whole world of people creating Twitter hipsterbots.2

The rewrite of hipsterbot gave me a solid codebase to build out the wikibot that’s been in my head for awhile now. I’ve been plugging away at that, and I should have it up and running in early December.

3D Printer Project

Made some serious progress on the D-Bot CoreXY project — got all the materials ordered, went over to Peacock Groove to borrow Erik’s cold saw, and chopped up the V-slot extrusion. A ton of parts got ordered and are trickling in from China. That link above will take you to the most-recent progress report.

Bike Shit

Kinda stalled out for the moment. Something had to give with all that life is throwing at me right now.

Other Stuff

Also delays — see “Bike Shit” above. Oh wait, I did buy the Lego WALL-E set, and started in on that. I’ve still got half the head and the arms to build, but it’s pretty awesome. It’ll probably go on my desk at work starting next week.

Also, I pre-ordered tickets for Rogue One. Like you do. As of this posting, it’s T-minus 12 days (for me).

Next step: cool dynamic dashboard of my lifemetrics. It’ll only work when my Macbook Pro is up and running, but it’ll be pretty cool.↩

I’ve also discovered there’s a couple of cases where it doesn’t play nice and tries to post stuff in excess of 140 characters, and sometimes shits the bed where it treats the tweet content like an array. Need to bug check, but for now, it works.↩